Archeology: Layer by layer, dig exposes deeper truths

TEL TAYINAT, Turkey — Archeology was likely the last thing on anyone’s mind when gunmen killed four police officers this week in southern Turkey, and tear gas had to be used to quell subsequent clashes between Turks and Kurds.

But less than 100 kilometres south of the ethnic strife in Dortyol, a handful of Canadian and Turkish archeologists were quietly working away on the questions that drive violence like this: How do we see ourselves as different than others? How are we the same? How does our past determine our future?

For more than a decade, two teams, one Turkish and one Canadian, have been working on two hillocks that overlook a highway just outside Antakya, near the Turkish-Syrian border. Tel Tayinat is on the north, behind a rundown cotton mill, led by the University of Toronto’s Tim Harrison. Tel Atchana is to the south, led by Aslihan Yener, a professor at Koç University in Istanbul.

If you could lift up into mid-air a layer of soil, about a kilometre wide and a few metres deep, you would find near the north, signs of an ancient city with temples, palaces, ironworking, and pretty designs on pottery. It would have been the seventh or eighth century BC. The super power of the day, the Assyrians, ruled here as they did elsewhere, and the Assyrian governor built his residence where the cotton mill is now. Its remains are under there still. But a terrible fire had leveled the town. Had it been other invaders? An earthquake? After all, the town was near a fault that would kill 250,000 in AD 526, more than a millennium later.

Lift another layer of soil, and the Orontes River, now well south of the dig, may have changed its course, perhaps running where the highway is now. Or maybe it had spread out to become a lake.

Lift a few more metres, and you would come to another strata. A temple is in the same place, but it seems to be in the style of the Hittites, who were most powerful before 1200 or 1300 BC.

Reach back still further, and it seems most of the population lived to the south, at Atchana, around 2200 BC. At some point, they moved to Tel Tayinat, left for hundreds of years, then moved back.

Sadly, to the north you will not see the footings of a truly monumental structure, 28 by 35 metres. Turkish farmers bulldozed it to accommodate more cotton crops just 40 years ago.

All over the world, development of one sort or another is plowing under critical archeological sites. Turkey is in a particular dilemma because it has so many rich sites. But the country is pushing to grow more prosperous, and embrace modernity. That means development.

In the 1930s, the legendary archeologist Robert Braidwood identified 178 significant sites here on the Amuq Plain alone. By the time Yener returned from the University of Chicago to work in her homeland, many had disappeared and more were going fast.

Laws that forbade destruction were half-heartedly enforced, if at all. Yener began to campaign, documenting areas where archeological remains were overrun, and bringing in the police. At first, landowners would get, as she describes it, “a laughable fine and then they’d do it again.”

Finally, she managed to convince a judge who said later, “we thought they were just piles of dirt.”

The next time a landowner ignored the law, he was thrown in jail for three months. The bulldozing stopped.

Now, says Yener: “There’s nobody in Turkey that’s not interested in archeology. This is our culture.”

Tayinat and Atchana are critically important, says Harrison, because they have so much to tell us about such a long and varied period in ancient history, and because they were a crossroads for trade, and immigration.

A strategic dig like this can be a focus of research for generations. “These sites are like laboratories. If we can do it right, this could be a signature site,” says Harrison. “Megiddo (in Israel) is a smaller site and it has been operating since 1900.”

The directors of the two sites are campaigning to have research centres and tourist facilities built here. The governor of the province has visited the site and seems to look favourably on the project, having a passionate interest in the Hittites. Philanthropists have also visited to look into funding possibilities.

Harrison came to the site in Turkey through his association with Yener at the University of Chicago. He is passionate about its potential, and has launched a group called Friends of Tayinat. Its inaugural bulletin, released earlier this month, outlines the plans for an archaeological park and research centre including visitor interpretation facilities to “help foster greater awareness of its role as an historic crossroads, or bridge, between the cultures and peoples of Turkey, the Middle East, and the West.

As he sees it, the distant history of this region “has an intense bearing on the present. The archeological record could resolve or mediate, even transcend cultural differences.”

The combatants at Dortyol might not be in a mood to listen right now, but in time, they might gain a different perspective. After all, the city’s name means “crossroads” and it was here that Alexander the Great fought Darius in 333 BC.

Perspective in time: The modern reason for ancient history.

Citizen reporter Jennifer Green is in Tel Tayinat on the Amuq Plain in Turkey, where Ottawa's Stephen Batiuk is part of a group of 30 archeologists uncovering and sifting through 3,000-year-old artifacts. The team is hoping to piece together the mystery of how this once-powerful kingdom, possibly tied to the biblical Philistines, rose and inexplicably collapsed.

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